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“But what is it?” the Inquisitor asked, ears flicking with annoyance as she peered at the massive white beast stomping around her courtyard, nickering nastily at everyone who wasn’t Cole. It was quite pretty, with a flowing mane and tail that shimmered like starlight. Its hooves and horn glimmered gold in the brilliant light of early afternoon.
“A gift,” Josephine said, a bit too cheerfully. “From a noble who seeks to curry your favor. It is a rare, almost mythical unicorn.”
The Inquisitor peered at it. “It doesn’t have a sword through its face like the other one.”
“Because this is a natural unicorn,” Josephine said with infinite patience.
The Inquisitor’s right ear twitched, her expression flattening. “You said mythical.”
“I said almost mythical.”
“And this from you,” Varric interjected, leaning against a wooden post and giving the Inquisitor one of those shit-eating grins. Her ears twitched again. “The woman who does at least ten impossible things before breakfast.”
She pulled her lips back and gave him a snarl. Any normal person would have seen that expression and pissed themselves, but Varric just laughed like this was all good fun. It was infuriating how she was supposed to be the most deadly person in Thedas – though, probably, the Hero of Ferelden was more so – but none of her companions seemed to treat her with the respect deadly people deserved. Actually, now that she thought about it, no one did. It was always Inquisitor, fetch this thing or Inquisitor, take this other thing to the place with the people or even Inquisitor, my wife is dying and my son knows how to cure her so please go to him but, oh, no, he won’t come back with the potion or even given you the recipe he’ll just give you the potion to bring back to me necessitating you making future trips to bolster the Inquisition’s reputation. Not that she had strong feelings about this.
“Also this unicorn is not dead.”
“Fluffy,” the Inquisitor said with sharp enunciating, “is not dead. She is respirationally challenged. More importantly, why doesn’t this one like anyone except Cole?”
Solas, who had been hovering at the edge of the courtyard with a studious expression on his face, swung toward her at the question. “Lore surrounding unicorns posits they prefer the company of virgins and will defend a virgin quite violently.”
The Inquisitor went still. Her mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. “Oh,” she finally managed.
“Indeed.” Solas slipped closer to her. “Given the unicorn’s nature, it might be best to have—”
He broke off as the unicorn, with a whiny loud enough to burst eardrums, rounded on them and charged. He threw himself to the side, snapping a barrier into place around himself, Josie, the Inquisitor, and Varric, and stumbled. He righted himself only with Josie’s help.
“Oh,” the Inquisitor said as the unicorn paced in a circle around her. She felt heat rising to her cheeks. It wasn’t that she was ashamed of being a virgin. That didn’t bother her at all. It was just that a four-legged beast with a spike growing out its head was telling everyone in Skyhold that she’d never gotten laid.
Twenty-four years old, leading one of the most powerful political forces in the world, surrounded by men and women who pretty much oozed sex appeal, and she’d never had sex.
This was her life.
She dragged a hand down her face as Varric made a noise of pure delight. “Inquisitor, he seems to like you.”
“I’m going to kill you,” she muttered.
The unicorn’s muzzle rubbed against her face. It lipped her ear. With a shriek, she bolted away from it.
“He really seems to like you!” Varric called after her as she tore across the courtyard, the unicorn prancing happily after her.
She tried hiding in the great hall. She tried hiding in the tavern. She climbed the ladder to Cullen’s Blighted bedroom and crawled under his bed – much to his sputtering horror – and the damn thing somehow managed to follow her everywhere. When she decided to go out on missions, it was waiting in the stables, somehow saddled, looking at her with huge, watery eyes that seemed to say Ride me, beautiful virgin, and she’d go red to her ears.
Passing judgments was next to impossible. The Tevinter shem who had led the Wardens astray had taken one look at the unicorn standing proudly beside her throne and dissolved into giggles. Ser Ruth, who had turned herself in around the same time the Tevinter mage was brought before her, took one look at the unicorn and started choking. Ostensibly on laughter, but the Inquisitor hoped the woman swallowed her tongue.
“You can’t follow me everywhere,” she told the damn beast as it followed her across one of the ramparts. She and Cole kept putting him in the stables. He kept escaping. Somehow.
Vivienne thought he was possessed, and Bull tended to agree, but everything was demons and despair with those two anyway.
“You need to let me do my job.” He stared at her with watery eyes. She attempted to remain unmoved. “You need a name, too.”
He pranced, hopping from hoof to hoof as if he understood. In the back of her head, she heard Solas intoning, Unicorns are widely believed to be incredibly intelligent creatures. Do your best to be polite. That horn isn’t for show.
“Pokey?” she suggested.
The unicorn gave her a look that pretty clearly said, You’re shitting me.
“Fine, fair, I agree, it was a bad idea.” She was bad at naming things, though. The other day, she’d scraped together enough lambswool to make a new set of robes for Solas, and when asked by Dagna and Harritt to give the coat some kind of identifier, she’d just said, “Sheep’s Clothing.” They’d looked at her like she’d grown two heads before declaring it Resisting Magical Something or Another.
She had told Solas about the incident. He hadn’t approved, though she couldn’t fathom why.
Tugging on one of her braids, she gave the unicorn an assessing look. “You kind of look like a Bob to me.”
He blinked at her and that blink somehow managed to convey his dripping disdain.
“Not Pokey. Not Bob.” She chewed on her lower lip, and the unicorn made a sound that might have been horsey delight. It disturbed her. Deeply. She stopped chewing on her lip. “We could go with something noble. Charger?” He shook his head. Or ruffled his mane. Or something. She took it to be a no. “Dasher? Dancer? Prancer?” She paused. “Now that’s just ridiculous. You’re not making this easy, you know.”
He shuffled up to her and rubbed his nose against her shoulder. She, meanwhile, eyed the exceptionally sharp tip of his horn as it bobbed next to her face. Tentatively, she stroked the unicorn’s neck. “What about Hanal’ghilan? You’re not a halla, but it’s a noble name.”
He whickered and caught her ear with his lips. With an indignant shriek, she tore across the parapets.
In a rare moment of unicorn-free time later that afternoon, she slipped into Solas’s room to study the murals he was painting. And possibly to snuggle up to him and make him incredibly uncomfortable. There was something to be said for flustering him, and it was so delightfully easy that even a virgin could do it.
In her defense, she wasn’t much of a virgin. The unicorn might count her as one, but she’d done more than her fair share of playing poke and tickle with some of the other youths in her clan. She’d just never gone far enough to jeopardize her position.
“Solas,” she greeted cheerfully.
His head snapped up, his eyes darting all around her. Then he relaxed. “I see you’re without your stalwart protector.”
She slipped up to him. He wasn’t painting, was standing beside his table with a book in one hand. His fingers, long and lithe and delightfully wicked, were splayed across the pages of a book that lay open on the table before him.
Dancing her fingers up his tunic, she drew closer to him. “Stolen moments are so rare,” she purred, watching with delight as his eyes widened slightly.
“Inquisitor, I—”
“You?” she asked, rising onto her toes to brush her lips against his. It wasn’t even close to a kiss, but it was enough to get her a little tingly and a lot interested in actual kissing. She wanted real kisses, the fiery, passionate, he-shoves-his-hands-in-her-hair kinds of kisses. Kisses that involved tongue, but not Fade tongue. Fade tongue only got a girl so far.
He swallowed and made a strangled sort of noise in the back of his throat. “I don’t think…”
“Oh, but you do,” she murmured. “Entirely too much.” She canted her head to the side, sliding one arm about his neck. His book tumbled to the ground as his arm went around her waist, tugging her flush against him.
Their mouths were so close, his eyes so intent and filled with burning, desperate wanting.
From above them came a mighty crash.
“Confounded creature!” Dorian shouted. He followed that shout with many more, none of them understandable, all of them Tevene.
Solas all but shoved her away from him, throwing himself at the scaffolding to the side of the room as she heaved a heavy, beleaguered sigh and Hanal’ghilan tore into the room looking like a demon. He snorted, chest heaving, head lowered, and charged straight at Solas.
His horn missed Solas’s butt – and what a tight, sexy butt it was, she thought as he scrambled up the ladder – by inches.
Hanal’ghilan skidded to a stop between her and Solas, scratching the stone floor fiercely with his hooves. He huffed, dragging one hoof over the stone as if readying to charge, and she sighed heavily. “We need to discuss personal boundaries,” she said to him, patting him on the back.
It took her and Cole promising Hana’ghilan the best oats and a stupid amount of sugar cubes to get him to leave Solas’s rotunda. It took even longer to get the unicorn back to the stables, where the Inquisitor assured him up and down that she wouldn’t go anywhere near Solas ever again and he needn’t worry about her losing her virginity in the near to immediate future. He snorted, clearly not believing her, which was pretty much the right response because that night, Solas barged into her dreams with all the subtly of a charging druffalo.
He caught her face in his hands and kissed her, and she threw her arms around his neck, wrapping her legs around his waist and forcing him to hold her. They stumbled until her back pressed against a wall, and his tongue was in her mouth, tasting her, and it was so good.
Except for the part where it wasn’t real.
“I’m going to kill that creature,” Solas growled against her mouth, working his hands under her tunic to cup her breasts. That was also good. It was better than good. Heat lanced through her, and she dragged his mouth back to hers for more kisses.
She’d done a lot of kissing in twenty four years. Well, to be fair, it wasn’t as though she’d popped out of the womb and started kissing people. Maybe it was more like twelve years, unless she counted that time she kissed Theron when she was six. It hadn’t been a good kiss. She decided not to count it.
“I’m going to kill you,” she growled back, tugging at his clothes, wondering why he bothered with them in the Fade at all.
Probably because they never got much further than kissing shirtless. He always balked at that point.
“What have I done?” he asked as he caught her lower lip in his teeth, tugging gently.
She responded by grinding her hips against his, making him gasp with pleasure and shock and, really, he should be used to her doing this like this by now. “Nothing, hahren,” she replied in a throaty murmur, and he pressed closer to her, his eyes flickering with lust. “And that’s the problem.”
She heard something crash. It was a splintery sound. Rather like what wood might sound like when it shattered. She went stiff in his arms, and he noticed immediately. “Vhenan?” he asked, drawing his hands down her sides.
“Oh, by the Dread Wolf’s hairy ball—” The Fade dream fractured as a very large something pounded up her stairs and neighed loud enough to wake the dead. She bolted upright from her nest on the floor – she still wasn’t used to the concept of shem beds – and hurled her pillow at Hanal’ghilan’s face.
It hit his horn and stuck.
As he shook his head wildly, trying to dislodge the pillow, she threw another one. “It was a dream!” she shouted, hurling a third pillow. “It was just a dream, I was dreaming, and how did you even get in here?”
In the end, her pillow went flying off Hanal’ghilan’s horn and straight out her open window. It soared over her balcony and disappeared into the snowy mountains. Hanal’ghilan had the good sense to bow his head and give her those sad, watery eyes that were almost as guilt-inducing as puppy eyes.
“I’m still mad at you,” she groused as she patted a spot next to her pile of blankets. Hanal’ghilan happily settled there, and, after a moment, she dropped a pillow on his side and curled up against him. It wasn’t so different from sleeping with a halla.
The next morning, she stumbled into the tavern for breakfast with Hanal’ghilan on her heels, and Varric, who was always obscenely cheerful at all hours, saluted her with a mug of that wonderfully bitter, disgustingly perfect drink the shems called coffee. She made grabby hands at it and he surrendered it to her. “Looks like you’ve still got your unicorn chastity belt,” he said and she dragged her hands down her face, pushing the coffee aside and leaning across the table.
“All I want,” she hissed, “is to kiss him.”
“Who, the unicorn or Chuckles?” Varric asked, waving a serving girl over for another cup of coffee.
She pinned Varric with a glare that could probably melt silverite. At the very least, it should have seared the flesh off his bones.
Varric, however, was immune to such looks. She knew this. She still tried to employ them. They always failed. “My hahren—”
“That’s what the kids are calling it these days?” He rubbed his chin. “I’ll have to remember that.”
“That,” she sputtered, “is a term of respect for an elder and not some – some—” She broke off, still sputtering.
“Some salacious pet name?” he supplied.
Dorian dropped into the seat next to her. Aside from Cole, Dorian was the only man Hanal’ghilan let touch her. “Who are we giving salacious pet names to? Can I be next?”
She dropped her head to the table with an audible thunk. “It’s bad enough everyone knows I’ve never had sex with anyone,” she complained into the wood.
“And all you want is for Solas to throw you down and have his wicked way with you, but you have one very large, very white, very horny problem,” Dorian said with far too much cheer for the time of morning.
There was a beat of silence. Then he and Varric broke into laughter so loud it probably reached the Creator’s in the Beyond. She wanted to claw their faces off, but that wasn’t what civilized Inquisitors did.
The door to the tavern banged open, and she turned her head to see a very surly Solas in the doorway. He stopped there. Saw Hanal’ghilan. Hanal’ghilan saw him.
Some kind of energy snapped between the two of them, Hanal’ghilan pawing at the hardwood floor as she hissed at him to behave. Solas spun about on his heel and left. With a cheerful whicker of pleasure, Hanal’ghilan nuzzled against her shoulder.
“I’m going to die a virgin,” she groaned.
“Was this even an issue before our friend showed up?” Dorian asked. He had tried to pronounce Hanal’ghilan’s name once. She had told him if he ever tried again, she would burn all his silky robes and force him to wear cotton. The horror on his face had been priceless.
“No,” she moaned, reaching blindly for her coffee.
One of them, Creators bless them, pushed the mug into her hands. She picked her face off the table and hunkered over the steaming mug, taking small sips of the still too hot drink. It was black and bitter – as bleak as her sex life. She pointed to the mug. “This coffee is my sex life.”
“Hot and steamy?” Varric asked.
“Bitter and black and awful.”
“I thought you liked coffee,” Varric said.
“I don’t. I hate it.” She drank it anyway. “It’s just a good kick in the ass in the morning so I’m awake enough to wrangle all of you. Like whiny little halla who don’t want to go in their pens.”
“We have pens now?” Dorian asked. “That’s rather deviant, Inquisitor.”
“I hate you,” she muttered, throwing back the rest of the coffee in a single gulp.
She began to plan. She went to Cole, because Cole was the only one in Skyhold other than her, apparently, who was a virgin. It was awful. It was terrible. Because of Hanal’ghilan, she knew more about the sex lives of everyone in the Inquisition that she ever wanted or needed to know. The reverse, of course, was also true, and the only one who didn’t seem to care was Cole. Everyone else teased her mercilessly.
“Still have your white shadow,” Leliana had said idly in the War Room two days ago while Hanal’ghilan had lowered his horn at Cullen and proceeded to push the Commander around the room – the Inquisitor had not wanted to consider why.
Just yesterday, Sera had gone on at some length to Blackwall about being elbow deep in circumstances. And had asked the Inquisitor how her circumstances were. They’d both howled with laughter. The Inquisitor had wanted to die.
Or to stick them with something pointy.
Hanal’ghilan was off harassing someone else, so she was planning. With Cole. Planning with Cole was more like trying to herd cats than halla. He kept wandering off in his mind, and she kept having to refocus him. She understood the drifting; they were in the tavern, and there were lots of thoughts constantly brushing up on him. “We should have gone to one of the empty towers,” she said after two hours of getting nothing done.
“I can lead him away for a while,” Cole said abruptly. “We can make crowns of flowers and give them to you when it’s done.”
Her head hit the table with an audible thunk. “Couldn’t we have come to this conclusion at least an hour and a half ago, Cole?”
“Maybe,” he said. He tilted his head to the side. “But you weren’t ready then. You are now. Don’t worry, Solas burns, too. Heated, hot, heavy hands on his—”
Squeaking, she flailed, shushing him. “That’s private, Cole!”
“But he thinks it so loud.” Cole blinked at her with those huge eyes of his. “So do you. You think about him pushing, pressing, pinning. Holding you down and—”
She sputtered, pressing her face into her hands. “Private,” she groaned. When her face stopped flaming, she lowered her hands. “Let’s do it, then. You lead him away. Do the flower thing. And I…”
“Will have and be had,” Cole supplied.
“Yes, that,” she agreed.
So Cole left, and she watched him go to the stables. She watched him lead Hanal’ghilan to the gates. She watched him lead the unicorn out. And then she ran for Solas.
He was pouring over some book she was sure was very interesting, but it couldn’t be more interesting than him bending her over something and—well. She really didn’t know where to go from there, she’d just heard Dorian talk about being bent over things. Presumably, it worked the same way as everything else, but she just didn’t know.
“Hahren,” she said breathlessly, stumbling to a halt just in front of him.
He looked up at her with interest, but not interest.
“Forgive me, but I—”
“Cole took Hanal’ghilan out of Skyhold,” she said, and there was the interest she was looking for. She held out her hand. “Come with me?”
Creators, it suddenly occurred to her that he might say no. That he might gently rebuff her. He had hinted, on more than one occasion, that she was too young for him, that it was inappropriate for him as her hahren to act on any feelings for her. She would strangle him, she decided, if he told her no.
He shot to his feet, taking her hand. “You deserve better than what is sure to be a quick tumble,” he said as she all but dragged him out of the rotunda and hauled him across the great hall.
Behind them, Varric called out, “Unicorn chastity belt, Inquisitor!”
“I’m going to stick you on a spit and roast you, Varric,” she shouted back just before she pushed open her door.
She and Solas tumbled through the door and scrambled as quickly as possible around the tower to the actual door to her room. Then they were through it, and his hands were in her hair, dragging her mouth to his as he pressed her against the side of the stairwell and kissed her. Creators, it was a kiss. His nails scraped against her scalp as his tongue swept into her mouth. It was real and visceral and it flooded her with heat.
“Bed,” he said against her mouth, and he started to draw away.
“The wall is fine,” she protested, pulling him back.
His teeth found her lip, biting and tugging, and she whimpered softly before pressing another hot kiss to his mouth. “Not for your first time,” he said.
“Solas, you could fuck me in the dirt in the woods, and it would be fine,” she snapped, thrusting her hand into his breeches to find him achingly hard.
He swore, cleverly and creatively in Elvish, as she closed her fist around him and stroked. Creators, he was big. She’d stroked boys in her clan until they spilled in her hand, but they were boys and Solas was a man, and the idea of having this part of him inside of her was turning her brain to goo. Her smalls were a mess. She was a mess.
“Fuck me here, hahren,” she breathed, squeezing his cock. He gasped, his breath fanning across her lips. “Up against the wall, just like this.” She rubbed her thumb over his tip, rolling her hips against his thigh.
“Vhenan,” he said, strangled.
“The more you protest, the more time you waste,” she pointed out, taking his hand and guiding it between her legs.
He hissed, pressing the heel of his palm against her clit, rubbing her through the fabric of her trousers, and her mind went blank. She rocked against him, grinding herself on him in a rhythm that practically had her soaking through the fabric. Words escaped her. All she could do was gasp and moan, mewling for more as she worked herself over his hand, hers still stroking him.
Yanking his hand back, he deftly unlaced her trousers. Pushed them down her hips. They caught on her boots, but that didn’t deter them. He stepped between her legs, and she lifted them, trapped as they were, around his hips. His fingers pressed against her wet cunt, one sliding easily into her, and he groaned. “I should do more for you,” he said.
“Fuck me,” she demanded, sliding the fingers of her free hand behind his head. She urged him closer, feigning a kiss, then went straight for his ear. Her lips closed around the delicately pointed tip and he snapped.
He tore at the laces of his breeches, knocking her hand aside in his efforts to free himself. She kept sucking him, pulling broken groans from him with every drag of her tongue along the shell of his ear. And then his cock was free of his pants, and he was pressing it into her, and she had to release his ear so she could let her head fall back against the stone.
“Yes, yes, yes,” she hissed, clawing at his shoulders as he worked himself inside her.
He murmured something in Elvish she couldn’t understand – he was always doing that, speaking far more of their language than any elvhen had a right to – and then he was all the way inside her. “Vhenan.” He sounded strangled.
She brought his lips to hers. “Doesn’t hurt,” she told him. “Shouldn’t it hurt?”
“Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t,” he ground out, and she ground against him, rocking her hips over his. They both gasped at the same time.
“Lucky me,” she said on a soft exhale. “Now, won’t you shut up and fuck me?”
He did. Creators, he did. He wasn’t tender or gentle. He was demanding, taking what he wanted with brisk thrusts that had her moaning his name every time he pushed into her. One hand curved around her ass to support her, to give her more leverage, while the other worked between their bodies to stroke her clit.
That was a revelation. Having a man inside her as he played with her? She could hardly breathe for how good it felt. Some demented part of her thought it felt so good in part because it was petty revenge on an obnoxious unicorn, too.
Then she was lost to thought, drowning in the feel of him. He made her cry out, made her quiver and shake in his arms, until finally, finally, her body clenched around his cock. It was the strangest, most delightful sensation she’d ever experienced, the orgasm somehow more intense for having him inside her. She swore – something about the Dread Wolf’s balls – and Solas swore – something about Mythal’s tits – and then he was coming, too, with jerky, abbreviated thrusts and a look of ecstasy on his face.
They slumped against each other, gasping.
“Vhenan,” he began, but she cut him off with bright, wicked laughter, peppering his face with kisses.
“Finally,” she crowed, laughing, kissing him, wrapping her arms tight around his shoulders and just hugging him. “Finally, finally, finally!” She pulled back, eyes widening with delight. “You know what this means?”
“I’m damned for all eternity for despoiling you?” he asked mildly.
She knew her expression was demented from the way his brows rose slowly. “That Blighted unicorn is going to hate me now!”
An hour or so later, Hanal’ghilan came screaming into the great hall, flowers braided into his mane. He slid to a halt before the Inquisitor’s throne, where she sat idly drinking coffee. He approached slowly, his nostrils flaring, and then recoiled from her. There was, interestingly enough, no condemnation in his eyes. Just quiet acceptance. He trotted away.
“I almost feel bad,” she said, taking a noisy sip of her coffee, as Solas drifted through the great hall toward her, a predatory look in his eyes.
At her side, Varric said, “Do you really?”
“Mmm. A little. A very little.” She sighed happily. “My sex life is still like my coffee, though.”
“Bitter and black?”
She gave him a wicked smile. “Hot and steamy.”
“More than I needed to know, Inquisitor,” he said, and he fled as Solas gained the dais.
“I believe I owe you hours of leisurely lovemaking, vhenan,” he said.
She tossed back the rest of her coffee and set the mug aside. “Let’s see if you can keep up, old man.” He did. But so did she, and it was wonderful.